I build both 64-bit FPC and Lazarus from the trunk sources on Windows so this doesn't affect me personally, but I notice that the 64-bit Windows installer is
still shipping with the ancient, buggy GDB 7.3?
Anyone installing on Windows 10 (likely also 8.1 or 8, and maybe 7 in some cases) is
highly likely to encounter extremely nasty bugs with that version (such as hard lockups of the machine that require physically powering it down and back on again), which doesn't paint a very good picture of Lazarus to newcomers.
There seems to be an "alternative GDB" section on the SourceForge page which is a step in the right direction, but overall I'd say a build of GDB 8.1 or preferably GDB 8.2 should definitely become what's officially distributed at least with the 64-bit Windows installers specifically as soon as possible, as the current copy of GDB is quite unstable on newer machines and just has many issues that do not exist in newer versions.
One other thing I noticed is that the 64-bit Windows installer is also still including a 32-bit copy of Make 3.80, which is not great both for build performance reasons and also because Make 3.80 was released in
2002, and has a variety of issues that (like I mentioned about GDB above) don't exist in newer builds.
Personally I've been using the Make/GDB/other binutils binaries that are available with the MinGW distribution maintained by Stephan Lavavej from Microsoft for around four or five years now on 64-bit Windows, and can attest to them working seamlessly as replacements for what Lazarus currently distributes. His website is here:
https://nuwen.net/mingw.htmlI've also attached a 7z file specifically containing the 64-bit build of Make 4.2.1 from his most recent overall release to this comment, if anyone wants to swap theirs out.